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Drinking small amounts while pregnant may affect the baby’s face

By Jessica Hamzelou

DRINKING low levels of alcohol when pregnant seems to subtly affect how a baby’s face develops, including the shape of the eyes, nose and lips.

Heavy drinking during pregnancy can cause fetal alcohol syndrome, characterised by facial features such as small eye openings, a short, upturned nose and a smooth philtrum over the upper lip. Children with this condition are likely to have attention and behavioural disorders and a lower IQ, says Jane Halliday of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Victoria, Australia.

To see if low levels of alcohol consumption can also affect fetuses, Halliday’s team studied 1570 women throughout their pregnancies. Of these, 27 per cent said they continued to drink at least some alcohol.

When the children were 1 year old, Halliday’s team photographed the faces of 415 of the babies from many different angles, creating detailed composite images. These showed subtle differences in the faces of babies whose mothers had drunk alcohol compared with those whose mothers hadn’t. These included a slightly shorter, more-upturned nose.

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Even low levels of alcohol – such as no more than two drinks on any one occasion, and no more than seven a week – were linked to changes in face shape detectable by image analysis, but not by the naked eye (JAMA Pediatrics, DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2017.0778).

Halliday says women who have drunk a little when pregnant shouldn’t worry, and that the effects might not be lasting. “We have not identified any problems for people to worry about.”

“Fetal alcohol syndrome is a huge problem and it is widely under-recognised or misdiagnosed,” says Christina Chambers at the University of California, San Diego. Halliday’s technique might help us “identify kids that might be affected and understand the full spectrum of effects”, she says.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Even minimal drinking alters a baby’s face”